According to EPA estimates, Americans produced about 250 million tons of non-hazardous waste in 2010. The non-hazardous waste was composed of a variety of materials include paper, plastics, metals, rubber, wood, and glass. Of this material, only about 34% had been recycled. Recycling provides several economic benefits over de novo production, including reduced energy costs and reduced consumption of raw resources. One difficulty for recycling lies in separating the recyclable materials found in everyday trash. Not only can the waste be separated by type, such as separating rubber containing material from glass, but the material may be further separated by composition. Glass, for example, may be clear, green, or amber. Plastics may include polystyrene, polyethylene terephthalate, high density polyethylene, low density polyethylene, and polypropylene. In addition, some consumer goods, such as some types of beverage containers, may have components having different compositions. While it may be possible to encourage consumers to separate their glass waste according to color, consumers may not be able to recognize and properly sort plastics by composition. For this reason, consumer waste may be brought to a sorting facility in order to separate recyclable material from non-recyclable material, and further sort by composition and binned accordingly. The binned materials may then be shipped to recycling facilities for further processing.
Consumer waste may cover a wide variety of materials, and arrive from a variety of sources. The waste produced by the various sources may differ according to the source. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that the type of waste generated by a restaurant may differ from that generated by a household. For example, a restaurant may generate more food waste (non-recyclable) and the household may generate more rubber waste (rubber bands, erasers). It may be more efficient for a sorting facility to have adaptive workflow methods that take into account the expected type of waste generated by different sources. Such adaptation may include the number and size of receptacles, as well as the number and placement of the sorting personnel within the sorting facility.